GCHQ spied on millions of Yahoo webcam users

The UK government spied on millions of Yahoo webcam users and secretly took photos during conversations before storing them for analysis, it has been revealed.

The revelations were published by the Guardian, based on Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden. They represent some of the most disturbing insights into bulk data surveillance carried out by the UK’s spy agency so far.

The programme, called Optic Nerve, gathered a vast number of user images every five minutes, without any specific target. The data was then used to help agents potentially identify their targets by cross-referencing the images with those already on its databases.

"Face detection has the potential to aid selection of useful images for 'mugshots' or even for face recognition by assessing the angle of the face," reads the GCHQ document. "The best images are ones where the person is facing the camera with their face upright."

The document from which the information was taken dated between 2008 and 2010 and was said to have targeted as many as 1.8 million users around the world in one six-month period.

The document also revealed that the GCHQ has gathered vast amounts of explicit images of users. “It would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person,” it wrote.

“Also, the fact that the Yahoo software allows more than one person to view a webcam stream without necessarily sending a reciprocal stream means that it appears sometimes to be used for broadcasting pornography."

Yahoo was understandably outraged with the report, issuing a statement saying it was “a whole new level of violation of our users' privacy that is completely unacceptable".